printABC’s George Stephanopoulos exposes BO’s thesaurus of excuses for what most media are euphemizing as “a mandate to buy health insurance,” also a tax.
Writes Stephanopoulos:
“…in our most spirited exchange, the President refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy health insurance is equivalent to a tax.
Here it is:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…
OBAMA: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax? …
[Observe the president’s slithering and sliming for yourself.]
STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
[SNIP]
BO’s ignorance and evasion would pose no major obstacle given the dogged devotion among the dogs of the media to minimizing and covering up Da Man’s many mistakes.
However, even this master of manipulation might find it hard to slither away from his latest faux paux: The Baucus bill reads:
Excise Tax. The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is between 100-300 percent of FPL, the excise tax for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or an individual claimed as a dependent) is $750 per year. However, the maximum penalty for the taxpayer unit is $1,500. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is above 300 percent of FPL the penalty for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or as an individual claimed as a dependent) is $950 year. However, the maximum penalty amount a family above 300 percent of FPL would pay is $3,800. [P. 29]
Of course, the Baucus-Obama coercion is simply a natural extension of the collectivization of choices. If the state is to become the custodian of every individual in this country, and assume the onus of their care—then said serfs cannot act as they please. Big Daddy puts it as follows:
[F]or us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.
Being a freeman and receiving freebies from the State are mutually exclusive. A pact with the devil has consequences. These will be bearable for the parasites who demand some form of taxpayer-subsidized care. Not so for those of us who yearn to live free.
Update: Here are a few pertinent points (which, naturally, do not address rights) made by Philip Klein of the American Spectator:
“While it is true that some people end up showing up in emergency rooms without paying and that imposes costs on others, there’s two things that Obama isn’t taking into account. First, just because you mandate coverage it doesn’t mean you elimate [sic] the uncompensated care. Second, if you have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidies enabling people to purchase insurance, then that costs far more than whatever would be saved by reducing uncompensated care. … Many of those who are currently uninsured simply have very low health care costs, which they are willing to pay out of pocket when they get sick. The reason why Obama supports a mandate is that he wants to be able to force insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions, and the only way to do that is to bring uninsured healthy people into the system. So really, this isn’t about eliminating freeloaders, it’s about forcing healthy people to pay for more health care than they need to so that they can make premiums more affordable for the sick.” [My italics]
One concession that I make to the Big Man is that our current welfare state already does TAX people for emergency rooms for so-called “loafers” so instead we will “MANDATE” the subsidized coverage – e.g. I concede that taxing the right pocket instead of the left pocket is not an “increase” per se over the current welfare state. In scientific terms, there is no “tax increase” in what would be called the “first order terms”.
I looked at the Baucus bill and the Adobe acrobat software counted the nonexistent word TAX only 268 times in the document.
Klein is also correct. The net tax increase comes in the “higher order terms”:
(1) A bureaucracy needed to enforce all these mandates and manage 3 billion medical decisions/year costs money
(2) Making something “free” will guarantee more use of it (e.g. doctors’ visits by people with minor aches and cuts, for example)
(3) Making something guaranteed as a “right” will also serve as a mechanism for more lawsuits, court-ordered coverage, etc.
(4) Making something guaranteed and easy to obtain serves as a magnet for aliens to come here for complex medical operations not guaranteed elsewhere
And our LIBERTY disappears as a result!
Forcing small businesses to provide health care or pay $8,000 per employee sounds like it will help them so much! These are the same small businesses that Democrats constantly villainize as “the rich” who aren’t paying their “fair share.” I guess we won’t have “social justice” till the top 10% pay ALL the taxes eh?
“The Land of Liberty”? I would like to see a tabular comparison of the US versus other countries. Also, the US today versus 1900. Liberty? What does that word even mean anymore in the US when 1/2 of GDP is consumed by government busy-bodies? I expect far more liberty after I’m dead.
There must be a law of “conservation of tyranny” at work since the fall of Communism has done US no good.
This has little if any reference to taxes but I had the opportunity to observe the local Emergency room in operation last night, Mon 9-21-09, about 7:30. A friend had heart pains- I took her to the E-room. They took one look and she was in ‘trauma’ at once. At 11:15 a woman, very pregnant came in, a minute’s consolation and she was being wheeled into Diagnostic Imaging. We left at 11:30. During the four hours I was there, moms and their teenage sons and daughters drifted in and out, the televisions stayed on the Disney Channel. I changed one to the USA Channel, but that lasted maybe five minutes before it went back to Disney, no one watched television though, they played with their phones almost constantly or visited like in the school hallway. The medical personnel did their job well and with a good attitude. Other than the two persons mentioned at the beginning of this comment, I saw no emergency, just the hospital being used as a regular doctor’s office. There is this strong desire to join a TEA Party.
On Robert’s comment:
In a free market, we would not have guaranteed “free” emergency room treatment to everyone – including aliens. We would have lower cost nurse practicioners and PA’s in clinics seeing the poor for routine stuff.
But the state has regulated itself into a “mess” of its own creation.